The present invention relates generally to protective body garments such as commonly worn by surgical and other medical personnel, especially disposable surgical gowns, and relates more particularly to the provision of a single-ply circularly-knitted cuff for use in such garments to encircle body openings in the garment, such as the wrist openings at the end of the sleeves of a surgical gown.
A is well known, it is of paramount importance in the performance of surgical and many other medical procedures that sterile conditions be maintained and, toward this end, physicians, nurses and other medical personnel participating in or present during such procedures virtually always wear sterilized protective body garments over substantially the entirety of the person's body, along with taking other precautions and sterility measures, to minimize the risk of transmitting bacteria, germs, diseases and the like between the patient and the medical personnel.
One common protective garment of this type is a surgical gown worn about the upper body and typically comprising a torso-encircling main body portion, normally opening along its back panel with tie strings or the like to close the garment about the wearer's body, and a pair of sleeves extending from opposite sides of the main body portion for covering the wearer's arm.
For enhanced maintenance of sterility, it is desirable to provide such surgical gowns with cuff portions at the ends of the sleeves to conform to the wearer's wrists. A knitted cuff, commonly of a tubular circularly-knitted fabric, is preferable for this purpose.
One on-going problem continually facing the medical industry is how to accomplish the overriding objective of continuing to improve and advance the sterility of surgical and other medical environments while at the same time avoiding or at least minimizing unnecessary increases in medical and health care costs. Toward this end, the medical industry has turned in recent years to the use of disposable one-time or limited use surgical gowns which can be manufactured inexpensively from non-woven textile materials and eliminate the necessity and expense attendant to other garments of cleaning and sterilizing the garments after each use.
While disposable surgical gowns and like protective medical garments have proved to be an effective cost-saving measure, concern has developed that the material and fabrication costs associated with the provision of knitted cuffs on such garments is disproportionately high in relation to the remainder of the garments.
Typically, the knitted cuff on disposable surgical gowns is formed of a circularly-knitted rib-type textile fabric which is fabricated in extended lengths and made into individual cuffs during the gown fabrication process by cutting the circular fabric to discrete lengths, everting the cut fabric portion upon itself into a double-ply cuff to provide a finished edge at the fold line thusly produced, and then sewing the adjacent cut edges to the end of a sleeve.
Although a two-ply cuff is undesirable in that the dual thickness of fabric and the labor involved in the cutting and sewing process contributes to increased costs in the garment, the two-ply cuff is considered necessary from a functional standpoint to provide a finished end edge to the cuff so that it will not unravel and potentially shed fibers that may, for example, find their way into a surgical site.